Wednesday, August 28, 2013

I was in a really rotten mood that
day back in 1983. I was unemployed, tired of job hunting and feeling depressed.
To improve my spirits I decided to do something I practically never did—Plein
Air painting. I packed my art supplies and
hit the road. I was a studio painter, but I’d long fantasized about the
Impressionists and what it would be like to plant an easel in a landscape,
empty my head of all preconceived thoughts and let my eyes and hands take over.

Monday, August 26, 2013

The front door was open to let out
the smoke, making it unnecessary for the firemen to sink their axes into it.

A George
Clooney look-a-like said, “We were just driving by on a grocery run and saw all
the smoke. Is everything okay?”

Before I
could answer, Mrs. C., wrapped in a wet towel, appeared at the top of the
stairs. “What’s going on? Why is the smoke detector going…” Her voice trailed
off at the sight of firemen standing in our foyer. She may have giggled. I’m
sure she did. She would later deny it.

“Sorry,
guys,” I said, “but it’s just a small grease fire, nothing to worry about.”

Sunday, August 25, 2013

I should have listened to the
little voice in my head telling me to keep my mouth shut. Before I knew it I
was in deep water. “Why don’t you take the evening off?” I said to my wife.
“I’ll cook dinner tonight.”

“I don’t
feel like spaghetti or tacos,” she said, ruling out my specialties.

“Very
funny. I can cook other stuff.”

She leaned
forward on her stool at the kitchen counter where she was balancing our
checkbook. “Like what?” She looked amused.

“You like pot
roast, don’t you?”

“It’s
rather complicated. Tell you what; go ahead and make your spaghetti.”

Under no
circumstances was I going to make spaghetti, which in my case meant opening a
jar. “Pot roast it is!”

“Making
pot roast isn’t as easy as you think.”

I
shrugged. “I grew up on pot roast, and I’ve seen you make it often enough. How
hard can it be?”

Friday, August 23, 2013

I resisted the urge to grab my bike and
pedal away as quickly as possible. I’d never seen a dead person, much less the
body of someone I cared deeply about, someone like Helen Delgado. I’d
practically grown up sitting at her kitchen table, watching her roll tortillas
and tamales, mooning over her while she listened patiently to my babbling. I
was afraid to walk around the crumpled Mercury, terrified by what I might see,
but Ricky was my best friend and I couldn’t abandon him to deal with this on
his own. I inched over and stood beside him.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

I was startled to hear knocking on
our front door early that September morning in 1965. It was Sunday. I was
enjoying a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and turning the TV dial looking for
cartoons instead of religious programming.

I opened the door and saw Ricky Delgado
standing on our porch, an expression on his face I hadn’t seen since we’d snuck
away to a local carnival so he could ride The Hammer. Ricky looked nervous.

“Did your folks come home last night?” he
asked, his voice thick with concern.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Last night our niece returned to her
Seattle home with her four month old baby in her arms. She confronted a burglar
in her living room. The burglar fled and no one was harmed, but this incident
reminded me of my one and only confrontation with a burglar.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

“Sorry.” I hadn’t realized I’d
been yelling. It was 1977 and I’d only been out of teller school a few months.
This was my first week working in a real bank.The manager came up to my
window several minutes later and said, “Our customers are complaining about
your yelling. You need to get your ears checked.”

Friday, August 16, 2013

Parody, an imitation of the style
of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic
effect, is a useful tool when seeking ideas for conceptual art. When I taught
illustration I often gave an assignment to find a famous work of art and mock
it in some way. I’ve painted many parodies over the years and not long ago I
posted one—Anne of Claws based on
Holbein’s Anne of Cleves.

In 1994 I was contacted by the art
director of Portland State University’s alumni magazine. He needed cover art
for an article titled “Curriculum Revolution.” I immediately began thinking about
famous revolutionary works of art, and Delacroix’s iconic Liberty Leading
the People sprang to mind. My idea was to
show Lady Liberty sporting a mortarboard, graduation cap, instead of the
Phrygian cap in the original painting. I presented a sketch and received the
art director’s approval to proceed to the final art…with one exception. The
director was adamant that I not show Liberty’s monumental breasts. Too
titillating for college students, I supposed.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

The children I grew up with were not
always kind, especially when their attention fell on short chubby kids like me
who talked too much. Making matters worse, I had a peculiarity that prompted
additional ridicule, a birthmark on my upper lip. When I was a kid, one of the
popular Smith twins across the street commented that my birthmark reminded her
of the one on Marilyn Monroe’s cheek. Her comment was overheard and before long
everyone was calling me Marilyn, even my
best friend Ricky Delgado.

Monday, August 12, 2013

My difficulties as an umpire fell
into two categories: first was a lack of familiarity with the rules of the
game, conveyed to players and spectators by the erratic methods I used to
communicate my decisions; second, my co-umpire (Mrs. C.) found it all but
impossible to remain impartial and not show favoritism to the hardworking
smallest kid in the game.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Summer is the time for sports and many
bloggers have great tales to tell about their athletic prowess. I’m not one of
them. My greatest athletic achievement is summed up in my post “The Zone.” But
there was a time when I was coerced into participating in another baseball
game, this time as an adult. Those of you who know me are right to assume it
didn’t go well.

Friday, August 9, 2013

Last year I wrote about my pet peeve over
kids only holding drumsticks in chickenadvertisements. I still haven’t seen a
child holding a thigh or breast. I now have another peeve—food in motion.

Physicists claim that everything is
in a constant state of motion and advertisers have taken this to heart.
Remember the days when commercials showed food on plates? Hungry Man Dinners
didn’t need to be rendered motionless with a baseball bat. Times have changed. Read about it (here).

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

This illustration has sold several
times and has always been one of my favorites. An art director asked me to
paint a picture that illustrated the futility of chasing after money. I
immediately thought of one of literature’s most famous lunatics—crazy old Don
Quixote—tilting at windmills in the belief that they were evil giants. Quixote
believed it was his responsibility to rid the world of them. In my picture I
decided to incorporate money into the scene by adding currency to the
windmills.

The story of Don Quixote has inspired many
artists, none more esteemed than Picasso

who created dozens of paintings
based on this fictional Spanish knight. My illustration is included on Business
Fundamentals, my royalty free art CD.

Click (here) to see the entire picture. Can you guess what the US Department of Internal Revenue used this picture for?

Monday, August 5, 2013

It isn’t often that I wake up
grumpy, but I did so on Sunday morning. It didn’t help when the microwave went
out—it will probably cost a few hundred bucks to fix. It didn’t help when I
called my mother and listened to her complain about everything she could think
of. If you think the world and everything in it is going to hell in a hand
basket just e-mail me and I’ll gladly share my mother’s phone number. Tell her you
hate Obama and she’ll invite you to her place and reward you with a sumptuous
meal that will include kale.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

She was once a star attraction with
people paying good money to wait in line just to gaze at her tender expression.
A place of honor was afforded her, a spacious wall with excellent lighting to
show her off to best effect. You might not think her worthy of such attention;
she isn’t young or beautiful or sexy, but she came with one of the best
pedigrees on earth for a painting—she was created by Rembrandt van Rijn. Or was
she?

Friday, August 2, 2013

You might have heard about this
on the news, but for me it’s personal; it happened in the building where my
wife and son work.

The Police Records Department is located
several yards inside the front door to our city hall. A thin young man,
approximately eighteen years old, paced in the entryway before approaching the
window and mumbling something.

Kathy (not her real name) was working the
desk. “Could you repeat what you just said?”